Son of a London Transport clerk who rose to the summit in Wall Street as chief
executive of JP Morgan

Sir Dennis Weatherstone, who died on June 13 aged 77, was a London foreign exchange dealer who became one of the world’s most respected bankers as chairman and chief executive of JP Morgan in New York; he was also tipped as a candidate to be Governor of the Bank of England.

Weatherstone spent his entire working life with Morgan (now JPMorgan Chase) and one of its predecessor firms, Guaranty Trust; but his humble British origins made him an unlikely figure to lead a Wall Street institution which had been founded in 1861 and whose senior executives almost invariably came from an upper-crust East coast mould.

What carried him to the top was his intuitive grasp of markets, strategic vision, calmness under pressure, and steely insistence on attention to “downside risk” — the potential loss or reputational damage that can result from bad decision making. He was in constant demand in international forums convened to discuss “systemic” threats to financial markets, and as an adviser to governments and central banks.

“If you can’t understand it, don’t do it,” was one of Weatherstone’s maxims. When Morgan’s bright young men invented new trading instruments and deal structures, they were allowed three short attempts to explain them to him; if they failed, their projects did not proceed. Nevertheless Weatherstone was a proponent of the use of financial “derivatives” — as a tool for hedging risk rather than amplifying it — and argued for self-policing, rather than heavy-handed regulation, of such fast-evolving markets.

Weatherstone was chairman of JP Morgan’s executive committee from 1980 to 1986, president of the firm from 1987, and group chairman and chief executive from 1990 to 1994. During the 1980s Morgan had passed through a painful internal reappraisal after heavy losses on Latin American lending, and was also forced to reconsider whether its traditional business model of long-term relationships with blue-chip corporate customers (famously defined by the founder’s son, John Pierpont Morgan Jr, as doing “first-class business in a first-class way”) was appropriate in the deal-driven, cut-throat culture of modern Wall Street.

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Though Weatherstone had grown up on the trading side of the business, he was quite clear where the priority should lie: “Our clients come first.” As those clients chose increasingly to raise finance through the public markets, Weatherstone led the remaking of Morgan as a securities firm as well as a lending bank.

In 1990 he won approval from the Federal Reserve for Morgan to enter the business of underwriting and trading securities — the first American commercial bank to do so since the separation of roles that was imposed on Wall Street after the Great Crash. By the time of his departure from the chair, three-quarters of Morgan’s revenues came from investment banking fees and trading profits rather than lending margins. When names were touted to succeed Robin Leigh-Pemberton as Governor of the Bank of England in 1993, Weatherstone was quoted by Ladbroke as a 15-1 shot for the job, which in fact went to Eddie George, whom Weatherstone held in high esteem as a fellow market professional.

In due course Weatherstone returned to London part-time, serving on the Board of Banking Supervision between 1995 and 2000. In January 2001 he was reappointed to the board (reporting to the Financial Services Authority), but this role ceased once the Financial Services & Markets Act 2000 came into effect in December that year.

Dennis Weatherstone was born at Islington on November 29 1930, the son of a London Transport clerk. During the Second World War he was evacuated to a family in Bedfordshire, and he later credited his foster mother with instilling in him an unusually strong sense of self-discipline.

He left school at 16 to follow two friends into clerical work at the City branch of the Guaranty Trust Company of New York; at 18 he completed his banking exams through evening classes at the Northwestern Polytechnic.

After National Service with the RAF in Egypt, Weatherstone returned to Guaranty Trust (which was acquired by JP Morgan in 1959, the merged firm trading as Morgan Guaranty) to become a foreign exchange dealer. In that role he impressed Lewis Preston, the patrician head of the London branch in the mid-1960s who went on to be chairman of Morgan (and, later, president of the World Bank).

After Preston returned to New York he called for Weatherstone to join him as a key lieutenant — among his tasks in that role was to orchestrate Morgan’s response to the Herstatt bank collapse in Germany in 1974. Weatherstone became treasurer of JP Morgan in 1977, and was to remain a director until 1995.

He also at various times sat on the boards of General Motors, the New York Stock Exchange, Merck & Co and Air Liquide. He was knighted in 1990.

Small, dapper, precise and soft-spoken — “He moved like a cat,” according to one observer — Weatherstone was notably modest in his personal style. He lived for many years in the first house he bought in America, at Darien in Connecticut, where he was a keen tennis player and much involved in local community life.

Dennis Weatherstone married, in 1959, Marion Blumsun, with whom he had a son and three daughters.